Sorry, nope. Energy goes up as the square of the velocity, and vice versa. Double the energy you only get 1.4 times the velocity. That hypothetical 132Mj gun only reaches 50% of escape velocity.
I'm not quite sure why they're picking Trolltech and Qt up,
Maybe they figured it would work out cheaper to do that than paying per-seat Qt commercial license fees for their 14,000 software developers somebody mentioned.;-)
(Seriously though, I doubt that played more than a small part in the decision. Acquisition is something big companies do to keep up the appearance of growth. Perhaps they also wanted to have more influence on the future direction of Trolltech's products.)
Okay, TFA is skimpy on actual details of the proposed law, and the summary less so, but every single smoke detector in existence is an "air monitoring device". They're planning on requiring a permit for these, now?
(Insert some joke here about how they can have my smoke detector when they pry it away from my hot, charred fingers.)
That's part of it. The other part is all the money we're sending to China for cheap consumer goods, and to India for cheap software development and phone support, is being used by their middle classes to buy cars and such and increase the demand in those countries for gas and oil.
That increased global demand raises the price we're paying for the oil we import.
I know that 5, 10, 20 years from now I would still be able to open the files, though I have no idea why I would want to.
I've got a few documents that are nearly 20 years old that I still refer to and have had occasion to edit. They were written in MS Word 5 for Mac. Good thing I long ago converted them to a more portable format.
I'm not wild about John McCain, but had he been elected in 2000, he'd probably have been an OK president and the country would be far better off today.
That may or may not be the case, but I'm more worried about him going forward. He's about as much risk to liberty as GWB has proved -- he's certainly pushed enough bills that severely cut into free speech, for example (the McCain-Feingold "campaign reform" bill among others).
The answer to most of your above questions is "yes". You'll probably find that the speed of sound in steel and carbon is higher than it is in wood. The whole thing is almost by definition -- sound is a longitudinal wave (compression/rarefaction) and so transmits as fast as the medium will compress.
If you try to physically push one end of such a rod faster than the speed of sound in the material, it will break. (You can accelerate the whole thing gradually, but if you hit it with a high enough impulse it breaks or permanently deforms, because the energy can't spread down the rod fast enough.)
The speed of sound in air is a bit over 1000 fps (feet per second), in water it's a bit less than 5000 fps, and in structural steel it's a bit less than 15000 fps. Wood varies, but 13000 fps is a rough average. In beryllium (very stiff, very light), it's a phenomenal 42000+ fps. A search of various web sites turns up two different values for the speed of sound in diamond, the lower being about the same as that in beryllium, the higher being about 50% faster than that.
This page has a table of the speed of sound in various materials, and some explanations.
Who the hell is Stephen Fry, how many Fisher space pens has he owned, and what (if anything) does he know about the behaviour of viscose fluids in zero G?
It gives the developer using the library more freedom, not everyone else. Hence the FSF's name change of the LGPL from "Library GPL" to "Lesser GPL".
Of course it's the same argument that BSD license proponents put forth. It boils down to who you're talking about, the developer or the downstream users (who may also be developers). As a user, I prefer the GPL. As a developer, I only care if I want to release a closed-source application. (And I'll take a BSD or LGPL'd library over a closed-source proprietary one so that I retain control over my own software; it sucks when your library vendor changes things, or it doesn't work quite as documented.)
If anyone else here is old enough to remember the "Man from U.N.C.L.E" TV series, or the books based on the series, they may recall that the various regional divisions of Thrush (the bad guys, explained in the books as standing for Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and Subjugation of Humanity, but that's a backronym) were also called satraps.
So IT Satrap must be the Thrush information technology department.
But nobody can demonstrate that the universe existed a week ago, although I'll procede to act as though it did, since that's the most useful operating assumption.
On the other hand, extrapolating that result in the long-term is difficult, and can not be proven or witnessed first-hand.
Astronomy (astrophysics) has that same problem. We can model changes in stars and galaxies over time, and the processes that cause star formation and supernovas, and we can duplicate on a very small scale some of these processes in the lab. But we cannot unambiguously say that stars, galaxies and supernovae actually exist and are not just complex 3D simulations projected on a shell surrounding us that the Voyagers are going to crash into any year now.
Unless someone invents time-travel, we'll never be able to confirm that what we think we know about the history of Earth and its lifeforms is correct or not, just as we'll never to be able to confirm what we think about the history of the Universe is correct. However, going forward we can confirm (or not) whether what we understand about the processes that bring about changes in lifeforms or stars and galaxies is correct (although it may take some time). If we're correct about the processes going forward, it's not unreasonable to assume that we're correct about them going backwards, too.
Not since the 1970s. Many ordinary foods work just fine in zero-G, so long as they don't produce lots of crumbs (no crackers!) or require too much preparation. It's pretty common to send up a few loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter (along with other foods) on Shuttle flights, and things like meat spreads, etc. work just fine out of a can -- they'll stick to the can or utensil rather than float around. You can even "glue" the can to a table (wall, etc) with a drop of water, the surface tension keeps them stuck together. (There's some NASA footage of this somewhere on YouTube.)
Yeah, they still do the reconstitutable stuff in a baggy too, but that's as much for convenience of preparation as anything else. Eating isn't hard in zero-G, but cooking is a bitch (as is the power requirement for refrigeration/freezing).
Oh, and an ordinary biro would have worked just as well anyway - you only need a pressurized pen for a de-pressurized area,
Not so, gravity helps the flow of ink in a biro (ballpoint pen to Americans). Try writing upside down and see how long that works, or even just horizontally (ie, pen horizontal on a vertical surface) if you think it's the gravity pulling the ink away from the tip. The pressurization helps force the ink out in a Fisher.
Because it's pressurized, Fisher ink is thicker than regular ballpoint ink, but that in combination with the pressurization also lets it write on (through) greasy surfaces and underwater. On the other hand, for regular terrestrial use I prefer something with a more fluid ink, like a Pilot G-2; I find the thickness (viscosity) of Fisher ink makes them harder (more force required) to write with.
If it only kills 99% of the pathogens, they'll be right back where they started in less than four hours. (Given the ability of bacteria to reproduce in about a half-hour in a friendly environment.)
Obviously there's an upper limit, but if there were sufficient nutrients to support the original population, they'll still be there (some of them in the form of dead bacteria, perhaps) to support the new population.
How the hell can you drink that crap? Starbucks coffee is terrible, and I'm not talking tastes-no-better-then-instant terrible, I'm talking this-coffee-is-burnt terrible.
How is Starbucks still in business?
You see the success of Microsoft and you have to ask a question like that?
It's all a matter of marketing. Starbucks takes cheap beans, overroasts them so that nobody can tell the difference, and markets their coffee to those who don't know any better but like to think they do. Then they charge for extra flavorings and sweeteners to make it halfway palatable. Compare that with how Microsoft sells software.
Both company's HQ's are in the Seattle area. Maybe it's something in the water.
In fact, people are routinely released "on their own recognizance", ie, nothing more than a promise to show up for the trial, if the offense is relatively minor and they think you probably will show up.
Consider traffic tickets, for example -- you sign a promise to show up for trial (or to plead guilty by mail and pay the fine) when you accept the ticket. If you don't sign, the cop can and probably will haul you off to jail.
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And the lawyers don't just tack the fines onto the bills they submit to the RIAA because...?
Sorry, nope. Energy goes up as the square of the velocity, and vice versa. Double the energy you only get 1.4 times the velocity. That hypothetical 132Mj gun only reaches 50% of escape velocity.
I'm not quite sure why they're picking Trolltech and Qt up,
;-)
Maybe they figured it would work out cheaper to do that than paying per-seat Qt commercial license fees for their 14,000 software developers somebody mentioned.
(Seriously though, I doubt that played more than a small part in the decision. Acquisition is something big companies do to keep up the appearance of growth. Perhaps they also wanted to have more influence on the future direction of Trolltech's products.)
Okay, TFA is skimpy on actual details of the proposed law, and the summary less so, but every single smoke detector in existence is an "air monitoring device". They're planning on requiring a permit for these, now?
(Insert some joke here about how they can have my smoke detector when they pry it away from my hot, charred fingers.)
my how we've bent over since then.
That's part of it. The other part is all the money we're sending to China for cheap consumer goods, and to India for cheap software development and phone support, is being used by their middle classes to buy cars and such and increase the demand in those countries for gas and oil.
That increased global demand raises the price we're paying for the oil we import.
I know that 5, 10, 20 years from now I would still be able to open the files, though I have no idea why I would want to.
I've got a few documents that are nearly 20 years old that I still refer to and have had occasion to edit. They were written in MS Word 5 for Mac. Good thing I long ago converted them to a more portable format.
What platform are you referring to from 1988 that is equal to or better than Windows today?
Almost any of the various (proprietary) Unixes running X Windows and something like OpenLook or such.
This Geek Tragedy is only an 'r' away from being Greek.
So then, Geek Tragedy is like Greek Tragedy but without the pirates?
I'm not wild about John McCain, but had he been elected in 2000, he'd probably have been an OK president and the country would be far better off today.
That may or may not be the case, but I'm more worried about him going forward. He's about as much risk to liberty as GWB has proved -- he's certainly pushed enough bills that severely cut into free speech, for example (the McCain-Feingold "campaign reform" bill among others).
The answer to most of your above questions is "yes". You'll probably find that the speed of sound in steel and carbon is higher than it is in wood. The whole thing is almost by definition -- sound is a longitudinal wave (compression/rarefaction) and so transmits as fast as the medium will compress.
If you try to physically push one end of such a rod faster than the speed of sound in the material, it will break. (You can accelerate the whole thing gradually, but if you hit it with a high enough impulse it breaks or permanently deforms, because the energy can't spread down the rod fast enough.)
The speed of sound in air is a bit over 1000 fps (feet per second), in water it's a bit less than 5000 fps, and in structural steel it's a bit less than 15000 fps. Wood varies, but 13000 fps is a rough average. In beryllium (very stiff, very light), it's a phenomenal 42000+ fps. A search of various web sites turns up two different values for the speed of sound in diamond, the lower being about the same as that in beryllium, the higher being about 50% faster than that.
This page has a table of the speed of sound in various materials, and some explanations.
Who the hell is Stephen Fry, how many Fisher space pens has he owned, and what (if anything) does he know about the behaviour of viscose fluids in zero G?
It gives the developer using the library more freedom, not everyone else. Hence the FSF's name change of the LGPL from "Library GPL" to "Lesser GPL".
Of course it's the same argument that BSD license proponents put forth. It boils down to who you're talking about, the developer or the downstream users (who may also be developers). As a user, I prefer the GPL. As a developer, I only care if I want to release a closed-source application. (And I'll take a BSD or LGPL'd library over a closed-source proprietary one so that I retain control over my own software; it sucks when your library vendor changes things, or it doesn't work quite as documented.)
Trolltech first released its Qt toolkit (for X11) under the GPL (v2) back in 2000. The Mac version was GPL'd in 2003 and the Windows version in 2005.
This announcement just means that they're adding GPL v3 to the licensing (it will remain licensed under GPL v2 also).
So I can no longer use QT to make whatever application I choose..
Sure you can; just pay Trolltech for a commercial license. That's always been an option.
I don't think that complaint has been valid in the last ten years, or whenever it was that Trolltech released the Qt library under GPL 2.
Arguably Gnome is the less open desktop, since GTK is licensed under the lesser GPL.
You're exactly right. In fact, the impulse is transmitted at the speed of sound in the stick.
If anyone else here is old enough to remember the "Man from U.N.C.L.E" TV series, or the books based on the series, they may recall that the various regional divisions of Thrush (the bad guys, explained in the books as standing for Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and Subjugation of Humanity, but that's a backronym) were also called satraps.
So IT Satrap must be the Thrush information technology department.
Me? No, I'm not denying or advocating anything.
But nobody can demonstrate that the universe existed a week ago, although I'll procede to act as though it did, since that's the most useful operating assumption.
On the other hand, extrapolating that result in the long-term is difficult, and can not be proven or witnessed first-hand.
Astronomy (astrophysics) has that same problem. We can model changes in stars and galaxies over time, and the processes that cause star formation and supernovas, and we can duplicate on a very small scale some of these processes in the lab. But we cannot unambiguously say that stars, galaxies and supernovae actually exist and are not just complex 3D simulations projected on a shell surrounding us that the Voyagers are going to crash into any year now.
Unless someone invents time-travel, we'll never be able to confirm that what we think we know about the history of Earth and its lifeforms is correct or not, just as we'll never to be able to confirm what we think about the history of the Universe is correct. However, going forward we can confirm (or not) whether what we understand about the processes that bring about changes in lifeforms or stars and galaxies is correct (although it may take some time). If we're correct about the processes going forward, it's not unreasonable to assume that we're correct about them going backwards, too.
"Evolutionism"? What the heck is that?
Is that anything like gravitationism?
They eat their futuristic food goo out of a tube,
Not since the 1970s. Many ordinary foods work just fine in zero-G, so long as they don't produce lots of crumbs (no crackers!) or require too much preparation. It's pretty common to send up a few loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter (along with other foods) on Shuttle flights, and things like meat spreads, etc. work just fine out of a can -- they'll stick to the can or utensil rather than float around. You can even "glue" the can to a table (wall, etc) with a drop of water, the surface tension keeps them stuck together. (There's some NASA footage of this somewhere on YouTube.)
Yeah, they still do the reconstitutable stuff in a baggy too, but that's as much for convenience of preparation as anything else. Eating isn't hard in zero-G, but cooking is a bitch (as is the power requirement for refrigeration/freezing).
Oh, and an ordinary biro would have worked just as well anyway - you only need a pressurized pen for a de-pressurized area,
Not so, gravity helps the flow of ink in a biro (ballpoint pen to Americans). Try writing upside down and see how long that works, or even just horizontally (ie, pen horizontal on a vertical surface) if you think it's the gravity pulling the ink away from the tip. The pressurization helps force the ink out in a Fisher.
Because it's pressurized, Fisher ink is thicker than regular ballpoint ink, but that in combination with the pressurization also lets it write on (through) greasy surfaces and underwater. On the other hand, for regular terrestrial use I prefer something with a more fluid ink, like a Pilot G-2; I find the thickness (viscosity) of Fisher ink makes them harder (more force required) to write with.
If it only kills 99% of the pathogens, they'll be right back where they started in less than four hours. (Given the ability of bacteria to reproduce in about a half-hour in a friendly environment.)
Obviously there's an upper limit, but if there were sufficient nutrients to support the original population, they'll still be there (some of them in the form of dead bacteria, perhaps) to support the new population.
How the hell can you drink that crap? Starbucks coffee is terrible, and I'm not talking tastes-no-better-then-instant terrible, I'm talking this-coffee-is-burnt terrible.
How is Starbucks still in business?
You see the success of Microsoft and you have to ask a question like that?
It's all a matter of marketing. Starbucks takes cheap beans, overroasts them so that nobody can tell the difference, and markets their coffee to those who don't know any better but like to think they do. Then they charge for extra flavorings and sweeteners to make it halfway palatable. Compare that with how Microsoft sells software.
Both company's HQ's are in the Seattle area. Maybe it's something in the water.
In fact, people are routinely released "on their own recognizance", ie, nothing more than a promise to show up for the trial, if the offense is relatively minor and they think you probably will show up.
Consider traffic tickets, for example -- you sign a promise to show up for trial (or to plead guilty by mail and pay the fine) when you accept the ticket. If you don't sign, the cop can and probably will haul you off to jail.